SilentSwarm or Mesh LLM?¶
This is the closest project to ours, and for serving alone it may suit you better: it is open source, runs on more hardware and encrypts traffic between nodes. It does not document fine-tuning, which is where SilentSwarm differs most.
Checked against Mesh LLM's own documentation on 2026-11-05. Projects change, so check their current pages too. "Not documented" means we did not find it in what we read, not that it does not exist. We have not run either project against the other, so this page has no speed comparison.
| Mesh LLM | SilentSwarm | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | Pooling GPUs across machines behind one OpenAI-compatible API | Serving and fine-tuning one model across mismatched machines you control |
| How a model is split | Contiguous layer stages from GGUF packages, on certified architectures by default | Contiguous layer stages, sized to each card's memory and speed |
| Hardware | CUDA, ROCm, Vulkan, Metal and CPU, on Linux, macOS and Windows | Linux with NVIDIA GPUs |
| Fine-tuning | Not documented | LoRA fine-tuning across the same split |
| API and interface | OpenAI-compatible API and a web console | OpenAI-compatible API and a web interface |
| Network | Across the internet, in public or unpublished meshes. It warns that unpublished does not mean access-controlled | Workers connect out to your own coordinator: direct links where possible, its relay otherwise, across buildings and routers |
| Encryption between machines | Yes: QUIC encrypts prompts, responses and activations between nodes | None of its own between machines. A WireGuard mesh encrypts traffic when it is up |
| Licence | Apache-2.0, open source | Source not public, terms agreed during the evaluation |
| Status | Very active, and calls itself experimental; stable release 2026-10-05 | In pre-evaluation |
Where Mesh LLM is the better choice¶
- Encryption between nodes, which SilentSwarm does not do itself today.
- Far more hardware, including AMD, Apple and Windows.
- Open source, under Apache-2.0.
- A one-line install.
Where SilentSwarm fits¶
- You want to fine-tune a model across the machines that serve it.
- You want a coordinator of your own with pools, accounts, scoped API tokens and an audit log.
- You want the split sized by each card's measured speed.
SilentSwarm has gaps of its own: no sandbox, and no encryption of its own between machines or at rest. Data and security lists them, and our benchmarks show what it does on old cards.
Sources¶
SilentSwarm is in pre-evaluation. We are looking for companies, institutions and individuals who want to try it on their own machines: Apply for the evaluation.